


we do not surrender, but want peace

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe, Early Modern Thedas, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 11:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5867356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fleeing a temporarily volatile political situation in Tevinter, Dorian meets an old flame somewhere between Nevarra City and Cumberland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we do not surrender, but want peace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityfails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/gifts).



> This is my half of a trade with the amazing [Katie](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com/). The prompt was "bull surprising dorian in some manner, and also possibly a beej." Both these components are definitely present. The rest is all on me.

It was in the winter of his fortieth year that Dorian Pavus found himself, not for the first time, unwelcome in the city of Minrathous. Well, why should he not be? A professional political nuisance could outstay his welcome so easily, and made for terribly dull company at parties besides.

He fled without those belongings he would have preferred to pack, but with enough bills to secure a comfortable journey. Once he had hidden on a goods train to cross the border, clothes unwashed and badly in need of a shave, in a desperate panic to find someone now many years dead. This time, he was—no, certainly no more careful. 

Simply more wealthy. A few favours called in for a discreet withdrawal and a first class compartment on the Val Royeaux express. One might find oneself running, but one need not do it without a bed to sleep in. Or, for that matter, without one's best coat.

Station after station, the rapid thudding of the wheels along the tracks, the sway of the carriage. They had come to Nevarra City, now. Row upon row of lights outside the window, glinting off the surface of the Minanter. The Necropolis was a dark bulk against the glowing skyline, turned in on itself. 

Dorian's gaze lingered on it for a moment before he twitched the compartment curtains shut. Why should one linger on the idea of the place when one was only passing through?

He thought fleetingly, all the same, of Cassandra's expression of distaste. Dead traditions ought to stay dead and have the grace not to shuffle or moan. 

How much more amusing it would be to visit the Necropolis in her company than out of it. 

The train jolted and slowed, brakes grinding. Central Station, and people came and went, shouted to one another, platform to train. The slam of doors, running feet outside his compartment door. So many heavy, rattling noises. 

He left the curtains firmly closed on the window and the door both, sank deeper into his seat, sighed. 

Then he rang for a drink, downed it too quickly, and dozed where he sat until the train stopped for fuel and water.

 

 

 

A disorientated awakening, then, startling back into consciousness with his mouth sour from the remnants of the whiskey. His limbs were cold with tiredness, a panicked thought unravelling in his mind as he tried to find the shape of it. Where am I. Who—

It was dark outside the window, no city lights to creep past its edges, and when he drew the curtain back a fraction he saw that the sky was the dark blue of early morning, some hours before sunrise. The clatter and scrape of coal, the uneven clunking of what sounded to be an elderly water pump. 

One might have slept properly, in one's bed, Dorian thought irritably, standing to stretch the stiffness from his legs. Of course, one might still. There was enough of the night left.

But the stop had jolted him a little too violently from sleep, and he found himself now possessed of a restless energy of the sort that would have him pacing, talking too fast, gesturing too largely. The lack of audience was a disadvantage, of course.

He might make his way to the dining car and enquire as to where they were, eat a little to make up for the dinner he hadn't particularly wanted to eat. Find a little company, although it would hardly be the sort he would wish for. None of his wonderful, vulgar Southern friends to be found here. 

Still: 

One took pride in one's ability to make the best of it. All those terrible Orlesians who had hardly pretended to listen when one aired one's concerns, much less when one displayed one's impressive wit. 

Although of course one had been vindicated in one's analysis of the political situation in the end.

Dorian sighed, and dug through the single case the Tethras lad had passed off to him as he stepped onto the train at South Plaza, and was relieved to find that a toothbrush had been thought of. He must commend the boy to his father, the next time he had the peace to compose a suitably dramatic letter to Varric about the entire affair. No writing-paper now, of course, and no focus either. _To my favourite Viscount—you will be overjoyed to know that after twenty years of existence, dear Cole is at last beginning to grasp certain fundamentals of corporeal existence—_

 

 

He had made himself largely presentable by the time the shouting began.

It came from outside the train. Fragments. An uncultured Orlesian voice, breaking through for a moment with sudden clarity—"not a bleeding station, you cannot just—"

Paranoia suggested: 

There. They've sent someone after you, and now some poor wretch is going to die trying to do his job, all on your account. How positively sordid political life can be.

Someone else spoke, a low rumble against the sharpness of the general chorus, and the words might have been indistinct, but the timbre of it—

Oh, come now, Dorian.

Are you so desperate to see your occasional lover that you would invent his presence?

He had started towards the outer door, all the same. Because he was not entirely lost to good sense, he drew his pistol before he opened it, flicked away the warding from its surface so that only the mechanical safety remained.

A lamp by the water reservoir pooled light, and the arguing figures were rendered soft silhouettes, and oh—

"Dorian," Bull exclaimed, starting towards the train.

The workers started after him.

"Please," Dorian called to them. "Do excuse my companion. He was merely following my instructions. I must apologise for my thoughtlessness. Ridiculous aristocratic entitlement of some sort, I suppose. I'll be sure to confess my sins to the conductor."

What a peculiar feeling of unreality it was that enclosed him. That sense of having wished something into being, as though magic worth the name existed in this modern age.

 

 

How huge Bull became in the carriage doorway.

How tightly he held Dorian, the second the door was closed.

Dorian, startled, exclaimed: "What—honestly—" before he had entirely managed to process the situation, and then, with a full-body shudder of relief, " _Bull_ , oh," and finally, with an attempt at sternness very much undermined by how much he wanted to be kissed, "how in the world are you here?"

Bull did kiss him then, hand curled against the base of his skull. Kissed him as though—

The train lurched into motion again, and Dorian stumbled, grasped at Bull's arm, found that Bull was off balance too—fell back against the closed door with a grunt of surprise, Dorian held to his chest.

Count the rhythm of the wheels, juddering through the soles of your feet. Count the rhythm of your heart.

Dorian's pulse thudded heavily in his hands, still clutching Bull's arms.

"How are you here?" he asked again, softer.

"Hey," Bull said. "I'm a spy, remember?"

Leliana, then, trading information for favours.

"Why," Dorian amended.

Bull's hand stroked his head, fingertips dragging against his scalp. Silence.

"Couldn't get a telegram through before you left," Bull said carefully. His face, so openly happy a moment before, had turned blank. "Got to get you off the train before the Orlesian border. Someone paid off the border guards. The usual crap. You always did like to piss off people with money."

"And I remain very much myself, it would seem," Dorian said. "Very well. But here I thought that perhaps you had missed me." A twitch of the lips, nearly a smile.

"I missed you," Bull said. 

No smile whatsoever.

"I told myself," Bull said, and broke off: head tilted back, eye closed, body still. A breath. And then he was back, himself, in motion, pulling away. A hand on the table, fingers tapping. "Never mind. Tell you later. You need to pack stuff away?"

"Barely," Dorian said. He had his footing again, but remained, all the same, off balance; grasping after a sense of significance which eluded him. "I left with very little, as you see."

"Right," Bull said. He pulled a battered dawnstone watch from his pocket, flipped the lid open. It irritated Dorian that he knew every detail of the inscription it bore without looking. "Half an hour to Cumberland, if we stay on schedule. You need food?"

"Bull," Dorian said, with emphasis, "I'll thank you to allow me to take care of my own needs. You are hardly my—"

He bit down on the next word sharply, teeth clicking together. Turned away. Too old to say such bitterly unjust things in a fit of temper now. 

It had been a game, once. Provocation, infuriation, winding each other tighter and tighter, despite the fact that they were also—friends, perhaps. Say that they were friends. 

The edge of invented anger had made it easier to be softer, after. To allow oneself languid kisses where one knelt upon the floor of Bull's office, surrounded by scattered papers and hastily shed clothes.

They had been, in some ways, terribly young.

Here:

Bull's hand on Dorian's shoulder, thumb rubbing at the base of his neck, at a bruise he'd left there.

"Hey," Bull said. "Let's be good for each other."

Bull said: "That's the only rule outside sex, alright?"

And Dorian said—

Who knows what he said. 

It was so many years ago: a strata of his life buried beneath the ash that was his father's death, the layers pressed close together, the boundaries muddied.

Who knows what it was that he imagined they might be.

"Dorian," the Bull said, here, now, a decade later. 

A hand on his shoulder.

Dorian's breath shuddered out of him.

Bereavement: 

Bull's hand lifted again hastily.

"Maker," Dorian said, and heard with a peculiar sort of distance from himself that he sounded desolate.

He turned.

Bull looked down at him with a worried, measuring face. 

The compartment walls pressed in. Dorian drew himself up.

"You might," he said, with as imperious a tone as he could muster, "kiss me properly."

Lights flickered against the windows; the streetlights of some unknown town, perhaps.

Bull's mouth, soft and scarred, was so terribly familiar against his own.

 

 

 

Bull, who knelt before no god or lord, who could hardly be made to bow when the occasion demanded it; Bull, on his knees, his hands pressed to Dorian's thighs.

Dorian lay a hand upon his head, between the horns which had once made him seem a being from another time, draconic, mythical. 

It was Bull who shuddered now.

Unreality, still. What a ludicrous thing this was. Of all things that this moment might have held, sex—and that he should crave it so—

Bull's hands were warm through his trousers. In the noisy rushing darkness of a long tunnel, the lamp guttering, Bull's breath was hot against his cock.

Inhale, exhale, deep and slow.

"Yes," Dorian said, quietly reverent. "Oh—yes—"

And what then? Only Bull's name, spilling from his tongue again and again as though to make up for all the days it had gone unspoken. Muted groans, a hand pressed to his own mouth when his voice threatened to betray him.

Bull's tongue dragged against the underside of his cock.

Bull's hands clenched against his thighs.

Would you let me worship you, I wonder, Dorian thought desperately. Even just for a night—

Lost the thread of his thought under the hot weight of Bull's attention. The deliberate movement of his mouth, the line of his bent neck. The bulk of his shoulders against Dorian's knees, and the slide of his hands up to Dorian's hips, keeping him trapped against the seat, oh, oh—fuck—

"How about," Bull said, hoarse against Dorian's inner thigh, "I let go of your hips, and you fuck my face."

 

 

A moment of breathless silence, Bull's face turned up to Dorian's, meeting one another's gaze. Bull's mouth was damp, inviting, a little smeared with Dorian's come; Dorian, awestruck, drew his fingers across Bull's lips.

Bull's tongue against his fingertips.

"How unrepentantly wicked you are," Dorian murmured, distracted. "I must commend you."

"Yeah," Bull said, "that's me."

Kissed Dorian's hand, lips twitching into a smirk against his skin.

"Might I," Dorian began.

But he hesitated for a moment too long. There were footsteps in the aisle. Not the hurried uneven footsteps of passengers, these, but a steady, deliberate tread.

A transformation: Bull, eye abruptly narrowed with focus, jaw tense, rocked himself back onto the balls of his feet, crouched in a semblance of a casual stance; in search of a dropped pen, perhaps. A stable stance to attack from, all the same. As if incidentally.

Another glance passed between them, of an entirely different character.

Dorian straightened his clothes hurriedly, but remained where he was.

Tickets, papers, kidnapping? So many delightful possibilities. It ought not be papers; not this side of Cumberland.

A slightly pink-cheeked conductor, rather young, with unfortunate hair. 

Bull didn't let go of his tension, but he dropped his hand away from his back, where it must have been reaching for a holstered gun. 

"Ah," Dorian said, with a confiding smile. "I imagine you're here about my unconventional behaviour while the train was stopped."

 

 

In Cumberland, the night air stung the skin, the wind harsh from the sea. The sky was shading yellow in a strip along the horizon, and Bull led the way through somber sleeping streets, pale stone facades with gaping black windows like eyes. Wild nets of wires spanned the street, three storeys above, shaking in the wind. Thin ice glittered blackly in the harbour below.

Another day, Dorian might have fallen in love. Today, he was preoccupied, and felt only cold. 

If he thought of love, it was not for places.

"There's a hotel that'll let us in up here," Bull said. "It's clean and staffed all night. That's about it. Come on."

"How _romantic_ ," Dorian said, and drew his coat tighter around himself, and wished that he had meant it as sarcastically as he said it.

 

 

A door once again between them and the world. Dorian moved around the small room, examining it. A hard mattress with clean stiff sheets, heavy curtains in an offensively floral pattern, atrocious brown watercolour landscape hung very slightly off plumb above the headboard.

Beyond the window when he lifted the curtain a little, the city stretched out, falling away to the water. The faint glow of streetlamps, the distant rumble of another night train passing through.

He stood there, caught by the view. Behind him, Bull rummaged through their combined luggage, lined his boots up neatly by the door, hung both their coats and straightened them out. Dorian didn't need to look to know it; another irritation, of a sort. To be so familiar with someone, despite all better judgement.

He sighed.

Bull had fallen silent. The sound of the wind was all around them, whistling in the chimneys, groaning between buildings. 

Dorian turned his head. 

"I told myself," Bull said, with such care that Dorian felt a sharp stab of terror, "that if you came back, I'd talk to you about some things."

"Some things," Dorian echoed uneasily. "That's terribly vague of you, I must say."

"My feelings," Bull said. "I want to talk about my feelings."

The curtain trembled where it lay against Dorian's hand. "I do appreciate that I've been gone for some time," he said lightly. "I understand if you've established some other arrangement that makes all this unsustainable. You needn't take pains to spare me."

Bull exhaled sharply, took a step towards him, another. Always so inscrutable when it mattered most. 

He stretched out a hand towards Dorian, stopped just shy of touching his face.

"No," he said. 

A beat. Dorian held his breath.

Bull shrugged. 

"I'm in love with you."

Imagine: to let go of all one's tension at once, collapse forward into Bull's arms, be held until one believed it.

Dorian held himself tall, controlled his breathing.

"I beg your pardon."

"I've been in love with you for years," Bull said, as though it was an entirely obvious and ordinary statement. As though he hadn't held detailed lectures on the topic of romance and the Qun. "You don't have to do anything about it. I just needed to say it. You deserve to know that you're loved."

"And that's," Dorian fumbled for a moment after words. "That's it? You're going to make this about what I need, as though I didn't—as though I wasn't—"

Bull watched him with that same careful patience, and didn't speak. Ask, or change the topic, or—but of course he wouldn't.

"As though I wasn't just as helplessly in love with you," Dorian said. If one must tell the truth, be acidic about it. "I swear to all I hold sacred, you're going to be the death of me. You cannot simply—that is—" 

Breathe, breathe, breathe. 

"I must say," he said, collecting himself, "I can't recall when I last experienced a day as peculiar as this one, and I deal with politicians every day. Bull, really—did you never—"

Sudden clarity:

Let's be good for each other, Bull had said. 

And his expression had been—

The city fell away below Dorian, a plunge into dark water. He felt it keenly at his back.

" _Venhedis_ , how many years must we waste," he snapped. "If you want me, say it. Don't you dare make this about what I need."

Bull raised his chin. His expression cleared, settled into calmness. "I want you," he said simply. "I've always wanted you. I'd follow you to Tevinter if you'd let me. I'd give you a home in Orlais if you wanted it. You can go wherever you like and do whatever you want. You're still here." 

A hand touched to his chest, over the heart.

In Dorian's head, it was a summer morning, sheets thrown back, the smell of clipped grass and damp earth through the open window. The drone of a plane overhead, distant and lazy. 

They lay with their legs tangled together, Dorian's head on Bull's chest. Listening to his heart beating. To live, and live, and live. To live although Felix had died, to live although both of them were in their own ways disowned, to live despite the looming threat of bloody war.

"Stay," Bull said, and Dorian nodded, and sank into the steady beat of Bull's heart, let it become a part of him, or became a part of it, and never emerged.

In the dimly lit winter room, Dorian's breath shivered.

"Bull," he said. "Come here."

 

 

The muscles of Bull's abdomen flexed under Dorian's hand. His chest heaved. Lips parted, eye dark in the low light. 

"Let me," Dorian said. A breathless, amazed gasp. "Let me." An ache in his thighs, stretched to let him kneel across Bull's hips. "You can't control everything, you know." A huffed groan as he shifted, felt the drag of Bull's cock inside him. "You needn't."

"Fuck," Bull said. "Fuck. I believe you."

His back arched.

"One day," Dorian said, quiet like a confession, head bowed under the weight of intimacy, "I want to tie you down like this and make quite sure that you're taken care of."

" _Fuck,_ " Bull said again, groaned as Dorian rolled his hips with intent, let his nails drag against Bull's stomach. "Oh, yeah. Look at you."

"You're not entirely without merit yourself," Dorian murmured. "Although I am, of course, magnificent." Bent himself forward to meet Bull half way for a laughing kiss. Bull's hands pressed to his sides, only touching, as though he couldn't help himself. 

 

 

"This will pass, of course," Dorian said. On the afternoon boat to Val Royeaux, there were few people. As far from the pleasure-trip season as one might imagine. "The political climate at home remains as fickle as ever."

"Yeah," Bull said easily, nodded thanks to the boy who'd brought Dorian tea. "You'll be back in there giving them shit again in no time."

"Naturally," Dorian said. "I've prevented more than one hopeless war, and they very well know it. If nothing else, at some point I suppose I will become an unfortunate necessity again."

"Let me come with you," Bull said.

Dorian's teaspoon clattered against the saucer. 

He stared at it in irritation. 

"Impossible," he said. "I require you as far away from the horrendous xenophobic mess that is my homeland as possible. I require you _safe_ , do you understand?"

"Hey," Bull said. "It's alright. I can deal with it."

Dorian swallowed, glanced away. "Must you tempt me this way?"

"Tevinter's changed," Bull said. "Not enough, but some. You did that. Might as well take advantage. And I'd be happier knowing I've got your back up there. You're not the only one who can worry."

"I'll—consider it," Dorian said. "I'm here now. A great deal may happen before the issue becomes a pressing one."

"Sure thing," Bull said. A cautious sort of tension.

"I don't plan to waste the time I know we have, I can promise you that," Dorian said.

He was anything but unaware of their surroundings. An elderly woman in long skirts that had been some years past fashionable the last time he'd been in the south, reading her paper with no more than casual interest. A group of men a little younger than himself playing cards.

All the same, he lay his hand over Bull's; felt the moment when Bull let himself relax.

"Sera's going to laugh herself sick over all this," Bull said, with evident pride.

Dorian laughed. "I look forward to it," he said; tested himself cautiously for any sense of trepidation, and was surprised to find nothing.

On the horizon, a hazy suggestion of the spires of Val Royeaux gained clarity by the moment. 

Here he had lived at one time. Here he had stumbled along a dark corridor to Bull's dilapidated little room for the first time, slightly drunk and terribly lonely. Not home, certainly. But close enough for nostalgia.

How I've missed you, he thought. 

No, not a love for places. 

He thought: I suppose, after all, I have lived long enough in fear.

He stood.

"Well then," he said, and bent to press the briefest of kisses to Bull's lips. "Shall we?"


End file.
